ABSTRACT
Changing Sentiments and the Magdalen Hospital charts the complex ideological territory of eighteenth-century sentimental discourse through the uniquely revealing lens of the London Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes. The Magdalen Hospital, established in 1758, has gured in history either as the last in a line of population charities motivated primarily by mercantilist economics or as a proto-evangelical penitentiary. But it is my contention here that, in its original incarnation, between 1758 and 1769, when the institution was known as the Magdalen House, it is most properly read as a supreme embodiment of sentimental ideals.1 In the London Magdalen House we see the cultural high-watermark of sentimental literary Romance and moral-sense condence in the compatibility of virtue and commerce. But, it is equally my contention that in the establishment of the Magdalen House we can see, with peculiar clarity, the ideological limitations of this sentimental project and an anticipation of the ways in which these ideas ultimately fail to underwrite commercial virtue. Sentimental discourse will fracture and evolve in the course of the mid-century. It will become increasingly divorced from the world, retreating into a primitivist, proto-Romantic virtue which claims no purchase on “things as they are.”2 Where sentimental vocabulary persists in a worldly context it will be become distanced from any guarantee of moral virtue: overlaid with a French usage where “sentiment” and “sensibility” describe exquisite emotion rather than rened and cultivated virtue.”3 Changing Sentiments and the Magdalen Hospital will be concerned to think about how the fracturing and shifting ground of sentimental discourse later in the century is registered in the changing practice of the institution and, in particular, in its increasing embrace of evangelical religion.
